On the veldt

National Review, May 25, 1992 by Linda Bridges

BARRING wild-eyed ideologues, nearly everyone who has visited South Africa has memories of some institution that he prays will not be swept away in the coming changes. My own list of such places is long, but very near the top of it is Mala Mala.

When I was planning my trip, I asked for advice from a friend who had been to South Africa many times. Before urging me to visit the great battlefields--Rorke's Drift, Isandhlwana, Blood River (which I also did, but that's another story)--he said, "I suppose you'll want to go to a game park, though, frankly, when you've seen one impala, you've seen them all."

Yes, I did want to go to a game park, and as I hadn't yet seen one impala, I didn't think there was much danger of boredom in a single weekend at Mala Mala, one of the three parks run by a private company, Rattray Reserves, on the western edge of Kruger National Park.

What I was afraid of was that it might be sort of like the Bronx Zoo as operated by Club Med--a bit too safe, a bit too posh. That fear started to evaporate when we arrived at the entrance to the Rattray property and learned that the Mala Mala lodge was ten miles north of the gates; and that the dirt road was varied with gullies and patches of sand. Not having bargained on an hour's journey, we were late for our first game drive. But not to worry, said the pleasant young lady at the desk (uh oh--Club Med after all?): Jock here, a young man with the cheerful bronzed look of a ski teacher or tennis coach, would take us out to join our group as soon as we had settled in. We were shown to a round building mimicking the native rondevaal, but no sooner had coffee arrived than the phone rang. It was Jock; if it wouldn't inconvenience us, he asked urgently, could we hurry back? He had radioed and learned that our ranger was stalking a leopard.

We did not yet know how rare a treat a leopard was, but nonetheless we hurried. "Hang on," said Jock, as we jounced away in the open-topped Land Rover twice as fast as I had dared take the little rented Ford. A giraffe ambled across the road and Jock shouted, "Out of the way!"--we would be seeing plenty of giraffes, he explained. A little further on, he pulled to a stop and motioned for silence. There, in a small clearing, were two Land Rovers and one leopard.

The leopard had lain down for a rest--the Rovers had been following him for a couple of miles--but although he yawned prodigiously, his pink mouth ringed with inch-long teeth, he was far from asleep. The tip of his tail twitched thoughtfully, and one was struck by how like and yet unlike a housecat he was.

After several minutes, Jock and Glenn, our ranger, maneuvered the two vehicles together. We would have to go over the top, Jock whispered, and Glenn later explained: The animals perceive Land-Rover-with-humans as a neutral entity, neither threatening nor enticing; human-without-LandRover is easily mistaken for dinner.

After a few more minutes, when our spotted friend showed no signs of moving, we went off in search of other game. Once it was safe to talk we met Glenn, also cheerfully bronzed, who was driver as well as guide; Jim, our black tracker, who rode up in the observation seat in the back; and our fellow guests, Johannesburgers who came here often and proved to be only slightly less sharp than the professionals at spotting a bird or an animal against a camouflage background. The shock at nature's perfection was sharp each time, when that tree you were staring at resolved itself into a giraffe's neck; the long grass, into a zebra. Who would think that such flamboyant coloring could appear positively sub-fusc?

The profusion of hooved animals that dusk was dazzling--an immense herd of wildebeest and zebras; a male and a female nyala, so different in looks and size that one would not have thought them the same species; kudu, with their delightfully corkscrewed horns; more zebras, this time two families, with foals; and (yes, Tony) quite a lot of impala. (Indeed, there are enough impala that the herds need to be thinned regularly; we were served impala meatballs when we stopped for a sundowner, and roast leg of impala for dinner that night.)

Our next find was another lot of cats: two lionesses with a total of five cubs. The mamas stonily ignored us, though the cubs looked interested, and they were so much like expanded, furry-eared versions of domestic kit- tens that one had the illusion one could cuddle them--an illusion the mamas did as much as Glenn to disabuse us of.

As we followed their slow progress, hoping they would lead us to papa, Glenn explained that what we had read of lion family life is true. Rangers had recently found a cub dead of a broken neck; the evidence suggested that he had foolishly tried to claim a portion of impala too soon, and his sire had reached out and thwacked him. We still hadn't found the male, but it was now full dark--time to go back. The drive up was more cautious than the drive down, and as we came to a large clearing Glenn suddenly braked and swerved off to the right. There, blinking in the glare of the spotlight that Jim shone on him, stood a rhino as big as our Rover. Fortunately, he was a white rhino: neither sort can see very well, but white rhinos are timid, whereas black rhinos charge at what they can barely see.